From the Wall Street Journal today:
An Economy of Liars, which may have been inspired by the idiocy of Barack Obama’s regime’s plotting to add still more business and financial industry regulations and policies, and more controls and subsidies and bailout protections, to the ones which have already failed.
The comments are almost as good as the article. It’s like the opposite of the CBC.
Lots of debate around what the author calls “crony capitalism”, as he properly associates it with being close to Mussolini (“We call that system not the free-market, but crony capitalism. It owes more to Benito Mussolini than to Adam Smith”) —but he dared not utter the F-word. I liked this one reader’s comments:
Marc Garrett replied:
We need a better name!
When the average American hears a disdainful remark about crony capitalism, he immediately associates it simply with capitalism. Crony capitalism is NOT capitalism at all.
The two words were apparently linked by the liberal media as a spurious assault on capitalism: guilt by association. Yes, the intellectual case has to be made, but you can’t ignore the viseral [sic] response of the populace engendered by the language.
I move we drop capitalism from the description altogether and simply refer to it as cronyism or even better, governmental cronyism. Language matters.
I second the motion. One reader outright suggested “Fascism”, the F-word. Another said “crony government”. Some current events readers might call it “the O-word”. (LINKED LINKS: One and Two.)
Now, let’s see if we can avoid the C-word, as the author also did! The author’s exit strategy is a re-established “Reliance on affirmative principles of truth-telling in accounting statements and a duty of care…”. See if after you read the article, you don’t think to yourself: If only more people in government and business adhered to a belief in something which guides and teaches and prods and directs them that lying and cheating and ripping people off and usurping their freedoms and controlling their lives for nefarious purposes weren’t considered a virtue… you know, something Ten Commandment-y…
- Say something. - Friday October 25, 2024 at 6:03 pm
- Keep going, or veer right - Monday August 26, 2024 at 4:30 pm
- Hey Joel, what is “progressive?” - Friday August 2, 2024 at 11:32 am